Duc said that in mid-2013 police discovered that Hieu, who was nominally unemployed, had grown unusually wealthy. Following an investigation, they discovered he had accumulated his wealth by uploading pornographic movies onto Ryushare.com--a site run by Nhat.

Further investigation found that Nhat launched the website in March of 2012 to share porn to paying members.

Police said that Nhat rented space on more than 500 foreign servers, mostly in the Netherlands and France, for roughly VND4 billion ($190,000) a month.

In July 2012, Nhat established the Nguyen Duc Nhat Company and authorized Onepay to collect fees from his website’s members.

Sixty percent of his revenues came from users who accessed his website through social networks, forums and websites in Vietnam and abroad.

Investigators said Ryushare hosted than 14 million files and attracted nearly 804,000 members, of which 80,000 were VIPs who paid a monthly fees of 9.96 Euros for fast and unlimited downloads

The website's VIP membership rolls included the names of numerous government officials and civil servants in Thua Thien Hue, investigators said.

Between January 2013 and March 10, 2014, Onepay transferred VND132 billion into Nhat's account. Police say he kept VND22 billion.

Meanwhile, Hieu, Vu and Ty received VND5 billion, VND500 million and VND80 million, respectively, for uploading numerous pornographic videos to the site.

So far, the authorities have seized two cars, three motorbikes, three laptops, four desktop computers and five savings books linked to accounts containing some VND7.5 billion.

Thua Thien Hue police are coordinating with investigators from the Ministry of Public Security to look further into the case.